If Max Chandler-Mather is trying to be Australia’s answer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his antics this week expose him as a poor tribute act.
His election in 2022 provided some progressives with hope, particularly given Australians were never graced by a genuine “left populist” in the 2010s. America got AOC and Bernie Sanders, Britain got Jeremy Corbyn, Spain got Pablo Iglesias Turrión, and Australia got… who exactly?
This is perhaps unsurprising. As Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello explain in their recent history of the left after the global financial crisis, The Populist Moment, progressive firebrands were most able to foment backlash to “the 1%” in countries scarred by recessions. Thanks to the Rudd government’s economic stimulus, Australia managed to dodge the downturns that ravaged Europe and America, leaving the centre-left and centre-right relatively impervious to outrageous outsiders.
But just because Australia maintained growth did not mean all was well economically, or that there wasn’t latent discontent ripe for translation into a political program. Inequality of wealth had widened, particularly between homeowners and renters. Wages had failed to keep pace with essential costs. Finally, the post-COVID cost of living spike has drawn attention to slow-burn inequities that the GFC had not.
Enter Max Chandler-Mather — a new kind of Greens MP employing explicitly left populist rhetoric. Where former Greens leader Richard Di Natale’s ilk had been urbane and professional, Chandler-Mather is brash and unapologetic, forged in the fires of student politics. The system was rigged, he told us, and it was about time someone shook things up.
I never underestimate the Greens’ tendency to disappoint their erstwhile bedfellows, and minor parties’ capacities to influence change in Canberra are invariably limited. But even I was briefly intrigued — could this egalitarian upstart positively influence the discourse, elevating the often ignored interests of young workers and renters? Could he pull an AOC?
He is certainly a gifted orator, a savvy content creator and a talented channeller of millennial and gen Z rage at our inequitable economy, particularly the housing system. He has pushed the interests of renters up Canberra’s priority list and championed the victims of our housing crisis with moral clarity. For this he is to be commended.
But his communications nous unfortunately overcompensates for glaring patchiness and unsophistication on policy matters, particularly so in his chosen portfolio of housing. And when challenged, he doubles down on his worst impulses.
This threatens to undermine his positive contributions, raising the salience of housing issues only to divert the righteous rage of young renters into dead ends.
Take his performance on the ABC’s Q&A this week. Chandler-Mather stated categorically that the planning system has almost no impact on housing affordability. This was despite fielding the question from the CEO of Nightingale, perhaps Australia’s foremost developer of affordable, high-quality homes, who had witnessed the planning system stymying his developments firsthand.
Evidence is increasingly mounting that planning rules that limit the supply of homes, such as height restrictions, heritage protections, cumbersome neighbourhood consultation and the like, reduce the relative affordability of housing, particularly for renters.
NSW Housing Minister Rose Jackson, who was also on the Q&A panel, correctly pointed to Auckland as just one city of an increasing number that have seen rents moderate under a relaxed zoning regime. It wouldn’t fix all Australia’s housing problems tomorrow, but planning reform is one important part of the solution. And it’d make it a whole lot easier for Max’s proposed public housing developer to break ground.
His refusal to accept this highlights the straitjacket of an overly dogmatic adherence to “left populist” rhetoric. Chandler-Mather prefers to criticise negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount — rightly, they’re terribly inequitable and expensive policies that should be repealed — because property investors can more easily be pitted as the “elite” against the downtrodden masses.
But the uncomfortable truth of Australia’s housing crisis is that the blame runs deep — far more people than just obnoxious big-time investors are implicated. Indeed, most homeowners are.
Thousands of suburban property owners have used the planning system to say “not in my backyard” to reasonable developments in their areas, out of nothing more than financial and aesthetic self-interest, and millions more have quietly benefited from their neighbours who did. And all homeowners benefit from a far larger tax concession than negative gearing, the capital gains tax exemption for the family home.
Such planning logjams and tax concessions are not in opposition; they reinforce one another to keep housing unaffordable. The former helps to make housing scarce, which increases its value; the latter further increases competition for those scarce units, increasing prices further.
The insidious logic of property capitalism has seeped deep into Australia’s bloodstream. Only confronting that fact and encouraging a broad acceptance of change will alter the status quo. Pinning all the blame on squillionaires, however odious, is just a willful diversion.
The traditional playbook of left populism might provide a few immediate answers to such a diffused set of vested interests, but many prominent exemplars have proven flexible enough to advocate the full gamut of housing solutions while maintaining the fire in their bellies. AOC, for instance, is a YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”).
Chandler-Mather’s approach, conversely, represents a much older tradition within the Greens than their newfound populism: a reliance on local NIMBYism to reach beyond the party’s traditional environmentalist base. The Greens are certainly not the only party guilty of this — almost all Australian parties have been at various points — but to continue this strategy amid the current rental crisis would amount to a betrayal of the very voters whose concerns Chandler-Mather has elevated.
If Max Chandler-Mather cannot champion renters’ interests in accordance with the evidence, then the hope invested in him by some young progressive voters will have been misplaced.
Do you know where Max lives? Do you know his electorate. The problem we have with the Brisbane City Council is that they are pushing development in flood zones. It isn’t so much as NIMBYism it is more let’s just plonk cheap housing in areas that flood. Also the BCC is best buds with developers which means relaxing development rules doesn’t improve cheap housing it just improves developer bottom lines.
I know you want to believe that Max is too young to understand housing but when you live in a flood zone you get an amazing education on it.
Maybe in other states you could do some more on relaxing development say like NSW where apartments are being built by unqualified engineers and are falling apart.
Maybe you could relax them in Victoria….I’m not going to make a dig at them…their amalgamated councils have produced some good outcomes and the state government going after property owner tax benefits has been fun to watch.
The answer to some is more housing without infrastructure, something I get to see in my suburb. I don’t mind development or housing but I do think councils in bed with profit making developers are not going to improve housing for cheap purchase or rent.
The federal gov since Howard has distorted the housing market with its tax benefits for people who don’t need it and the states are now running around trying to fix it. Max is in the federal gov….so guess which one he is going to focus on.
Yes, I remember that particular development proposal. To be fair, the developer upon being challenged did come up with a plan – engineering works to divert the water so that it would instead inundate the surrounding houses.
Max is an MP for the Greens – not a member of government.
I think that was a typo.
Is that all you got from the original post?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xzjvj1WjzNk&pp=ygUKc2FsIGdyb3Zlcg%3D%3D
I agree that relaxing zoning and development regulation is a minor problem in the big picture. Major tax reform is needed to gather the billions needed to provide the infrastructure investment required to catchup the shortfall created by record immigration numbers. This requires us to properly tax natural resources like oil and gas and to close loopholes like price transfering and fake loans by corporations using offshore tax havens. Another great initiative would be to abandon the AUKUS wealth transfer from Australian taxpayers to US/UK weapons manufacturers. Spending about 10% of that money on our real national interest of housing would substantially contribute to a more secure future for our most vulnerable people.
Howard and Costello are the root cause of the problem. They took good simple housing policies instigated by Keating as part of an overall reform agenda and turned housing into a very fruitful form of investing for massive profits with minimum Taxation.
And yet I work on local government conference after conference and see Clark’s opinion elucidated by developers after developer. Developers who, at the same conferences go on to spruik the value of their land-banked portfolios.
Chandler-Mather may have missed some of the evidence, but Clark is ignoring his share also.
Developers can only land bank because the vast majority of land can’t be redeveloped. Restrictions on the land that developers don’t own actually works in their favour.
My frustration about the housing debate, esp by the Greens, is the gap between the popular acceptance of the status quo and those activists claiming it is an easy fix.
As the article rightly points out, it is not inconsistent that the bad distortions in the housing market (esp the CGT discount) are popular, benefiting millions of investors at the expense of a similar proportion of renters. Owner occupiers are caught in the middle but want to protect their house prices.
Housing is a deep psychological mania in Australia – it needs years of conversation and national self reflection to fix, not some loud mouths yelling that the government should “do it’s job” – basically a set up to more LNP rule.
Fundamentally, any “fix” – assuming that means returning to a time when a normal person could buy a normal house without having to sacrifice a substantial amount of their lifetime earnings – means real devaluation of housing on the order of 50-80%.
“Political suicide” can’t begin to describe making that happen, or for that matter even being vaguely perceived to have suggested that it might possibly be an idea that could theoretically be discussed at some point in the future, maybe.
When “normal people” wanted to but a house, it usually DID take a lifetime
s savings – firstly to get the 50% deposit before the bank would lend and then paying off the mortgage.
50% deposit??
In my lifetime it’s never been higher than 20%.
For a long time, it was as low as 5%
Wot ?
Even in Melbourne, median house price was ~3x median wage as recently as the 1990s.
When my wife bought her first home (3-bed cottage on 600m^2) in Rockhampton in 2001, it cost $60k, equivalent to one year of her $60k graduate engineer salary and only 3x a minimum wage income of about $20k.
Huh?? My parents bought their house in the Brisbane suburbs for $80K in 1993, when the average wage was about $31,200. They had it all paid off in less than a decade. It’s worth maybe 10x that now, but the average wage sure ain’t $312,000!
it is offshore development owners who do the muck for profits in hand with corrupt lobbyland and political gatekeepers – DO The due dilligence – greenfields and onsite body corporations and maintainance on sites for
ad infinitum ; shareholders dividends blowin up in these corporations – and the Cayman islanders live in fairly abject state despite the coffers of these Whole Sick Parasites with all their private/ public investing over our once beautiful cities … wake up Australia
Not in my our backyard – if you believe they are doin ugly highrise overdevelopment to provide affordable homes for the populace you are deluded ; it is only about profiteering and creates only alienation and greed just like the mining of our precious resources for offshore profiteers
The main profiteering being done is by inner city suburban elite fighting against density in places where it really should happen.
And this NIMBY’ism happens at every level – firsly apartments are oppose to stop “outsiders” moving in; then mixed use (ground shops and offices) are opposed under the guise of “traffic management”, which all it does is prevents local options and imbeds car usage.
If I could, I’d bulldozer the inner 5km ring of evey Aus city to develop mixed use medium density with lots of public transport.
Bulldose the inner 5km of every Australian city – charming.
It seems the author has been captured by the YIMBY groups and wants to build a “straw man” of Mr Chandler-Mather’s arguments.
In fact, thanks to developers generously funding major political parties there is currently no shortage of politicians who want to remove resident’s rights and let developers build what and where they want. The problem with this supply fetish is that developers do not want to build affordable, well-built properties.
As a real estate valuer in a past life, I can assure the author there are 2 types of properties developer find profitable – cheap and shoddy and expensive high quality. The latter is built in well resourced inner-city locations, the first is built where the land is cheap(er) with poor connections to services and transport.
The absence of government intervention on the housing market for over 3 decades has underpinned the problem of quality, affordable housing – the planning system has been made the scapegoat to avoid dealing with the root causes of this social problem.
This makes sense. It has taken time for the steady approach of crisis to give birth. Along the way it has attracted so many aspects to it like iron filings to a magnet that basic causes lie hidden. 1. The fact is that resale of a home is not taxed, therefore is the best possible investment. Which is why we have the biggest homes on the planet. 2. #1 is implanted in everyone’s mind to make houses great investments. The government then made it so with the negative gearing lurk. Housing competed with pine plantations, jojoba farms and bottom of the harbour schemes, and beat them all without raising a sweat because houses produce ongoing income, and everyone understands them. 3. 50% off CGT.
Tagalong minor causes are developers’ land sequestration; immigration; relative decline in the number of builders – largely caused by so many going belly up in the covid import restrictions with its materials hyper inflation, because we are price takers in Australia having out-sourced pretty much everything to China.
The cure. 1. Tax deceased Estates. 2. Ditch negative gearing on houses. 3. Ditch the 50% CGT discount entirely. 4. Tax unused land, now held for future profit. 5. Reduce immigration while increasing the number of builders.
The screams from the many who bribe political parties should be ignored. The cure (my version) will take equally as long as it did to create the housing problem. To continue with no plan for a cure will see us continue the downward spiral. Silly things, politically inspired, like the first home owners grant, only raise prices. And as for robbing superannuation – completely crazy. The LNP hate Super and hate Keating, and would love to gut both.
I don’t see planning issues as any part of the cause, just a red herring. Anyway, I’ve had my say, thanks!
Having been an interested observer of the slow motion disaster all along.
And, just as there is only two weeks supply of petrol and diesel in the country, to the list can be added tek screws, plasterboard, copper pipe and all the rest. Plenty of hammers but fuck all nails.
The home is not taxed because the majority of people only sell their home to move into another home. Taxing that transaction would mean people are forced to take a significant quality of life hit just to move to another place.
Our houses are big for the same reason all New World houses are big – because they can be and that’s what people want. Land was cheap and not constrained by the limits of existing cities. The bubble is in the price of land, not the structures, so from an “investment” perspective it would actually make sense to have smaller houses on bigger blocks – which is the opposite of what actually happens today (big houses on small blocks).
Yes you are right. I didn’t make it clear that I would have homes taxed as part of a persons Estate when they die. Thus part of the attraction of owning it – to leave the full value tax free to the kids – would be gone. However you look at it it’s a tax rort. The property value would be a total asset value: house, business, etc. above a certain amount, indexed. No changes worth while to the tax system will happen in any future I can imagine, but they should, for the sake of some equality – which is healthy in any society.
And surely the bigger the house the bigger the tax rort, which explains the size more than any other factor. It’s not a conscious rort as such, but it has that effect. Bulk spare cash certainly used to go into the home. Less so, admittedly, now that negative gearing and airbnb have taken such a hold. Commodification of what ought, more sensibly, be places to live, rather than income streams. There’s no silver bullet other than an increased supply, which the market seems unwilling to allow. And if that is the case then the government should step in.
I’m fine with an Estate tax, though I would have a very generous tax-free threshold on it both a) to make it more politically acceptable and b) because it’s really only the wealthiest (fractions of the top 1%) who should be hit.
Broadly speaking, the teacher and nurse couple lucky enough to have bought a house in Sydney’s inner suburbs 60 years ago for tuppence and now handing it over at $5m value to 3 kids, are not the enemy. If the bubble had never hit and it was only worth, say, $750k they’d all be in relatively the same position.
There is no enemy. Unless it is inequality. Some inequality is always inevitable, but it needs to be kept down to a dull roar instead of the scream it has become – and getting worse. The simple fact is that societies which have greater equality have more favourable conditions for everyone, including the top 1%. They have better education, health, longevity and less crime. And are happier, I’d suggest (but with no proof).
To enable these good things to happen it would probably be necessary to ease them in over several years. Or am I dreaming? If we can’t even accept a carbon tax to save us all what hope is there?
Big houses reflect Australians’ attitudes towards sustainable living. They are like the big utes they love: expensive to buy, maintain, and run. Nobody ever talks about the running costs of a house and what this means in terms of achieving net zero. Jesus wept—why can’t people use their brains once in a while instead of salivating about the next thing they supersize?
Big houses have been around a lot longer (20-30 years) than big utes.
Nobody ever talks about the number of people means in terms of achieving net zero either.
Try convincing the lending institutions. They’re the one’s who can’t use their brains. If someone is looking to mortgage a house and the building doesn’t extend from fence line to line, the bank doesn’t consider the property’s value fully realised and won’t lend against it. It’s the land where the value resides, remember?
I really wish everyone would get their heads around that and stop blaming mortgagees for house sizes they didn’t choose and can’t do anything about.
Drastic, politics is the art of the possible. As many others have pointed out, ditching NG and the CGT was not possible in 2019. but maybe it’ll be possible in the future. Taxing undeveloped land already occurs, so no trouble there. I guess increasing the number of builders is possible, especially if we go back to goverment directly building social housing, which we should.
But reduce immigration? No matter how bloody obvious it is that we need to reduce immigration for many reasons, just try doing it. Just this morning in the SMH Shane Wright was doing a full Henny Penny on “depopulation”. Apparently we have to hit the panic button because births are only out numbering deaths at the moment by 106,000 or so per year. (And yet, in Japan, the population has dropped from 128.5 million in 2010, to around 123 million today, and everything seems to be just fine.) Apparently we have to have high immigration to keep the economic figures looking good, and never you mind all the downsides to high immigration. Economists, big business, ALP and LNP, all love high immigration. Very good luck with reducing it to historically normal levels, but I guess it is possible. However, your point 1: Tax Deceased Estates is not possible. Anyone running for office who even suggested a Death Tax should be discussed would lose in a landslide. You need to find a more creative way to tax wealth.
Developers happily sit on land banks with decades of supply, suggesting that this taxation is not even close to being enough.
Well you’re right on all that. But I am naive and stupid enough to keep saying what I think is the way forward. As long as people say, “Yes it’d be nice but can’t be done” guess what – it won’t be done. The same goes for climate repair: in every country around 70% of people agree with doing it. Unfortunately human nature tells them that few people agree with them, when the opposite is true. So they all say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if… but no-one would agree, so let’s not even say it”. So, let’s all say it and keep saying it until the people (using that term loosely) in charge of supposedly making the rules GET THE MESSAGE.
For evidence check out Our World In Data.
Dead right drastic. I always take the example of Wilberforce. If he’d had the attitude: “Slavery has always been with us, and the rich and powerful own slaves, so it will ever be thus” then the slave trade would not have been abolished as early as it was. Sorry, I did not wish to imply naivety or stupidity, and I should have framed it as a low probability rather than an impossibility. However, I still think there are ways to get those at the high wealth end of the scale to pay more tax with out invoking the “Death Tax” bogeyman.
Thanks, no worries – you didn’t imply anything. There are commentators on this site who I respect as experts, but I’m not one of them. I really am naive and stupid! (In fact, just a bog-standard human.) Sentience is a dangerous illusion.
Interestingly Japan has 123 million people in a country with about 5% of Australia’s land mass or, say, 9% of Australia’s arable land stock. I agree they’re doing just fine, although it may be unwise to ignore the economic dislocation they’ve gone through since 1990 or so.
It does makes you wonder why Australia thinks it’s full though. Factually, I mean, not emotionally.
Probably got something to do with things like <1% vacancy rates, ambulance ramping, schools dropping “temporary” classrooms onto their ovals and playgrounds, water restrictions, etc, etc. You know, all the stuff that’s directly related to “too many people”.
Thanks Drastic, agree with all that – particularly with your clarification below.
And congrats to you and Drsmithy for an intelligent conversation!
Death duties + a wealth tax for mine.
Thanks for giving us your insights Leo. Around me and in my street we have more than our fair share of 1960’s and 1970’s blocks of 12 flats. They were thought of as cheap builds at the time, but they have balconies, and 50+ years on they’re still sound and solid. You can get a three bedroom for $700-800k. Contrast that with what the developers are putting up now. Around the corner three single dwellings went and 27 units are replacing them. A couple sold off the plan for $1.3 million, but the bulk of them were in the $2.2-2.8 million range. So in the AIMBY (already in my back yard) suburbs, all the Yimby pressure is doing is helping Developers to make maximum profits at the high end. What’s already here is as affordable as it gets.
This is the s*** sandwhich that communities find themselves in. The federal government pumps the population, state governments have to figure out how to house everyone, and councils are in the middle getting hounded by state governments on one side for being NIMBYs and real people who don’t understand why their rights are being removed in order to throw up shonky developments in order to rapidly house the growing population. Meanwhile developers make out like bandits and anyone pointing out the ponzi scheme is demonised by so called “progressives”.
If you want to hit politicians, developers, bankers, etc where it hurts demand a reduction of migration to sustainable levels.
I and many others are on the same page Mr President, but the only way to put any pressure on the the ALP, LNP and Greens is not to give them your primary vote. That’s pretty lame. Unfortunately, we don’t have a Holmes a Court or Cannon-Brookes financing sensible centre independents standing for historically normal levels of migration. Perhaps we should try to persuade a Twiggy, or Gina, or Kerry, or maybe even a Rupert to come to our aid?
Indeed. The Teals are also some of the worst offenders here. Allegra “Big Australia” Spender being the worst. They haven’t figured out that all their “climate change” rhetoric falls apart in the face of high population growth.
The problem with this article is that the author did not look at all the evidence.
As pointed out by Michael Pascoe here (https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2024/01/10/housing-shortage-councils-pascoe), there is no evidence that development applications were refused by councils. Of course, it’s not quite zoning, but there is strong evidence that developers are deliberately sitting out the approvals to keep the prices high. As he explains, there are more approvals than there are projects.
Alan Kohler eventually agreed with that notion. And he also pointed out that the biggest issue is, indeed, the distorted tax system and zero social housing built by the government.
This has been very well discussed here: https://michaelwest.com.au/the-housing-crisis-we-didnt-have-to-have-and-how-to-fix-it/
“It is important to note that Kohler’s criticism of councils is about planning, not approvals. The latter is often touted as the root cause of the problem, frequently cited by federal politicians. In a recent article in The New Daily, fellow economics writer par-excellence Michael Pascoe makes short shrift of this particular furphy, pointing out that approval numbers (or timeliness) are not the problem and that there are generally more approved projects in the system than there are actual projects under construction. Kohler concurs but also highlights how developers are apt to “sit on” approvals as prices rise to maximise profits.”
So, I suggest getting the evidence right here.
Slightly off topic, but a criticism I have of planning is that houses now are expected to be heat/cold efficient yet the roads of new suburbs are not aligned with the desirability of houses to have their long axis east-west. With today’s tiny building blocks the roads ought to be north-south. The circular maze type may look pretty on a map but is highly irresponsible. Nature may abhor straight lines, but tell that to the sun!
Writes a screed about someone supposedly ignoring evidence, and then proceeds to ignore it himself. Apparently ‘evidence’ is what a developer claims on Q&A.
This is awful journalism. Half-wit stuff. I hope yr aiming for a career at the Herald Sun since that’s what this reads like. Please do critique the Greens. But do it properly next time. You might need to do some research, read some long and boring articles, slow down and think a little before you begin writing though.
Any specific complaints?